Skip to content

Lumlux Art

A–Z
Art Stream

Time Is Not Neutral

Clock Maria Taniguchi’s

Painting Time Without Painting a Clock

Maria Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” are made from thousands of hand-drawn rectangular cells, each individually filled. She began the ongoing body of work in 2008, and individual canvases can require days, weeks or months of repetitive labour. At Singapore Art Museum’s 2026 exhibition Afterimage, these paintings appear alongside sculpture and video, making repetition, material and duration visible across several media. Taniguchi considers the paintings less as isolated objects than as parts of one continuing artwork.

I find that idea more interesting than the apparent grid itself. From a distance the paintings can look systematic, even machine-like. Close attention reveals slight changes created by a human hand repeating a task for an extraordinary amount of time. Nothing in the image represents time directly, yet time is everywhere in it. The surface is almost an accumulation of hours. Instead of depicting duration, Taniguchi makes duration become material.

https://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/en/art-events/exhibitions/maria-taniguchi-afterimage

#MariaTaniguchi #PhilippineArt #ContemporaryPainting #SingaporeArt

singaporeartmuseum.sg Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage | Singapore Art Museum Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist presented by a Singaporean institution.
Afrobeat

Afrobeat Was Built as a System

Fela Kuti did not arrive at Afrobeat as a fixed genre waiting to be named. His musical path moved through jazz, highlife and soul, with musicians from West African and Caribbean backgrounds entering his early groups. His official archive places an important turning point in 1968, when he began publicly using the term “Afro Beat” as his music absorbed stronger soul influences. By the early 1970s, long grooves, horns, percussion, call-and-response vocals and political lyrics had become part of a musical language inseparable from his confrontation with Nigerian military power.

What fascinates me is that Afrobeat is difficult to reduce to one signature sound. It works more like a system. Bass, drums, guitars and horns repeat patterns for long periods, allowing tiny changes to become significant. The groove can feel almost immovable while the music remains intensely alive. Political force and dance are not competing functions here. The body is part of how the message travels.

https://felakuti.com/about

#FelaKuti #Afrobeat #NigerianMusic #MusicHistory

Fela Kuti About - Fela Kuti The official website for Fela Kuti: his legacy, catalog, and shop.
Colour

Colour Escapes the Canvas

Estonian painter Kristi Kongi’s Chromatic Drift at Kumu Art Museum refuses to keep colour neatly inside rectangular paintings. Created partly for the museum’s large exhibition hall, the project extends motifs and colour onto floors, walls, windows and outdoor space. Kumu describes colour as central to Kongi’s way of mapping and preserving memories and states of mind. The 2026 exhibition is also significant institutionally: it is the first solo exhibition by an Estonian woman artist in Kumu’s Great Hall.

What interests me is what happens when painting begins treating architecture as part of its surface. A canvas normally ends at its edge. Once colour crosses that boundary, the viewer enters the composition rather than simply standing in front of it. Colour stops behaving like decoration applied to objects and starts organising distance, movement and atmosphere. Perhaps painting becomes spatial not when it imitates three dimensions, but when it changes how we physically move through a room.

https://kumu.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/kristi-kongi-chromatic-drift/

#KristiKongi #EstonianArt #Painting #Colour

Kumu kunstimuuseum Kristi Kongi: Chromatic Drift - Kumu kunstimuuseum The large-scale solo exhibition of the painter Kristi Kongi (1985) offers an immersive spatial experience. In the new works created for this exhibition, colour emerges as the central element, with its fields of meaning unfolding in physical, emotional, and semantic ways.
Contemporary Art

A Nation Drawn While It Was Changing

The National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea looked at fifty years of independence through art rather than through a conventional political timeline. Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975 after periods of British, German and Australian colonial rule. The exhibition placed contemporary works beside cultural forms and showed how artists have addressed independence, ancestral knowledge, Christianity, technology and rapid social change. Figures such as Mathias Kauage and Timothy Akis helped shape a modern visual language that could absorb new materials without abandoning local cultural references.

Papua New Guinea contains extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. That makes the idea of a single national image complicated from the beginning. What interests me is how artists can participate in creating national identity without making everyone look the same. Art can connect different histories while allowing their differences to remain visible. Perhaps a nation becomes more convincing when its image is allowed to stay unfinished.

https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/bilong-papua-new-guinea/

#PapuaNewGuineaArt #PacificArt #ContemporaryArt #CulturalIdentity

Afro Colombian Music

The Marimba Carries More Than Melody

Along Colombia’s South Pacific coast and in Ecuador’s Esmeraldas Province, marimba music, chants and dances form part of Afro-descendant community life. Traditional ensembles combine palm-wood marimbas with drums and rattles made from local materials. In Colombia, different musical settings historically accompany very different moments: the festive currulao, religious arrullos and the mourning traditions of chigualo and alabao. Knowledge has largely been transmitted orally, with younger musicians learning directly from experienced performers.

What interests me is how one musical culture can contain celebration, worship, storytelling and grief without separating them into different artistic worlds. The instrument is not simply performing repertoire. It is part of a network connecting materials, landscape, memory and community. Even as people have moved from rural Pacific communities into cities, UNESCO notes that the music continues to function as a source of belonging. A tradition can move geographically while still carrying the place that shaped its sound.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/marimba-music-traditional-chants-and-dances-from-the-colombia-south-pacific-region-and-esmeraldas-province-of-ecuador-01099

#Marimba #AfroColombianMusic #PacificMusic #TraditionalMusic

ich.unesco.org Marimba music, traditional chants and dances from the Colombia South Pacific region and Esmeraldas Province of Ecuador - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Marimba music and traditional chants and dances are musical expressions integral to the family and community fabric of people of African descent in the Colombian South Pacific region and Esmeraldas Province of Ecuador. Chanted stories and poems are performed by men and women at ritual, religious and festive events as a celebration of life, a form of worship to saints or as a farewell to the deceas...
ARAVARA

Time Is Not Neutral

ARAVARA at the National Gallery of Jamaica is an audiovisual exhibition built around a deceptively difficult subject: time. Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and developed with KADIST, it brings together ten works by ten artists and is being presented through several Caribbean locations. The exhibition considers recurrence, repetition and historical layering, asking how promises of progress made in earlier periods continue to shape present realities. At the Kingston presentation, moving image and sound become ways of looking at history without assuming that time simply moves forward in a clean line.

I like that idea because museums themselves often organise history chronologically. One year follows another, giving the impression that the past has been completed. But political ideas, social structures and unfinished promises can return in altered forms. Perhaps history behaves less like a timeline and more like an image repeatedly edited without ever deleting all the previous layers.

National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026

#ARAVARA #CaribbeanArt #VideoArt #JamaicaArt

National Gallery of Jamaica National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026 The National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ), in collaboration with KADIST, is pleased to present ARAVARA, an audiovisual exhibition curated by Dominican curator Yina Jiménez Suriel. The exhibition opens …
Gamelan

One Rhythm Made by Many Hands

Gamelan is often described as an Indonesian percussion orchestra, but the word also refers to the collection of instruments itself. Ensembles typically combine hand-forged metal gongs, gong-chimes and metallophones with drums, cymbals and, depending on the tradition, strings and bamboo flutes. UNESCO notes that its music is organised through precise tuning systems, rhythmic structures and performance techniques. Individual instruments can play interlocking patterns that only become complete when heard together. Gamelan remains connected to ceremonies, theatre, festivals and concerts, and archaeological representations of musical ensembles appear on the eighth-century Borobudur temple.

That interlocking principle interests me. In much Western music we easily focus on the individual performer, melody or solo. Gamelan can make musical meaning feel distributed. No single player necessarily owns the rhythm we hear. The pattern exists because several people leave exactly the right spaces for one another.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/gamelan-01607

#Gamelan #IndonesianMusic #Percussion #MusicTradition

ich.unesco.org Gamelan - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Gamelan refers to the traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra and to the set of musical instruments used. Consisting primarily of ornate, percussive instruments made of hand-forged metal, the ensemble typically includes xylophones, gongs, gong-chimes, drums, cymbals, string instruments and bamboo flutes. Gamelan music follows precise rules and techniques regarding tuning, layout, rhythmic and ...
Addis Ababa

When a Landscape Is Felt Physically

Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Bekele uses grass, flowers, leaves and seasonal change as more than landscape subjects. In Moments of Change, shown at Addis Fine Art in Addis Ababa in early 2026, repeated dots and layered lines produced surfaces that could resemble landscapes, aerial maps or constellations. The works were made with acrylic on canvas and textiles, with fabric connecting the paintings to ideas of bodily vulnerability, effort and care. Bekele grew up in Addis Ababa, studied at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design and later taught there.

What stays with me is the decision to connect changes in nature with the way time is experienced by a body. We normally measure a season with dates, yet we recognise it through temperature, colour, smell, growth and disappearance. A landscape painting can therefore record much more than a place. It can describe what change feels like before we have found words for it.

https://addisfineart.com/exhibitions/136-moments-of-change-tesfaye-bekele/

#TesfayeBekele #EthiopianArt #Painting #AddisAbaba

City Music Born Between

A City Music Born Between Worlds

Rebetiko emerged in the urban centres and port cities of Greece during the early twentieth century, initially among working-class and marginalised communities. Its musical language did not grow from a single source. UNESCO describes a tradition shaped through exchanges among Greeks from Asia Minor and the Aegean and the Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, Balkan and Levantine communities of the former Ottoman world. Songs were originally transmitted mainly by listening, playing and learning directly from older musicians. Recordings, cinema, conservatories and universities later created additional ways of passing the repertoire on.

What interests me is how easily a music that begins on society’s margins can later become part of a country’s cultural identity. Rebetiko did not become valuable because somebody preserved it unchanged. It kept absorbing new surroundings, performers and technologies. Its history suggests that tradition may be strongest when it is flexible enough to travel without forgetting where it came from.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/rebetiko-01291

#Rebetiko #GreekMusic #UrbanFolkMusic #MusicHistory

ich.unesco.org Rebetiko - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Rebetiko is a musical and cultural expression directly linked to song and dance that initially spread among the urban lower and working-class populations in the early twentieth century. Rebetiko songs are now a standardized repertoire in almost every social occasion involving music and dance. The element is performed in public and performers encourage audience participation. The practice is open t...
City Photographed Before

A City Photographed Before It Disappears

Memoria y relato. Fotografía en Puebla looks at photographs made in Puebla from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1940s, drawing from public and private collections and including professional photographers, amateurs, visitors and anonymous makers. Museo Amparo deliberately avoids presenting a complete history of photography. Instead, the exhibition follows smaller visual stories through which ideas of the city and its inhabitants were constructed. That approach becomes even more interesting because the museum has invited people in 2026 to add contemporary photographs of Puebla to a “living archive.” Historical photographs can easily acquire an authority they never possessed when they were made. They seem to tell us what a place was. But every photograph is also a choice about what deserved to enter the frame. Placing old images beside contemporary contributions reminds us that a city is never finished being photographed, and its visual history is never complete.

https://museoamparo.com/exhibitions/pieces/313/memory-and-tale-photography-in-puebla

#Photography #Puebla #MexicanPhotography #VisualHistory

museoamparo.com Memoria y relato. Fotografía en Puebla | Exposiciones | exposiciones actuales | Museo Amparo, Puebla Organizada en el marco del 35 aniversario del Museo Amparo, esta exposición indaga en el vasto universo de fotografías producidas en Puebla desde me ...
Maria Taniguchi

Painting Time One Rectangle at a Time

Maria Taniguchi’s ongoing “brick paintings” are built from thousands of small hand-drawn rectangular cells, individually filled with paint. Some of the canvases become enormous, yet their structure comes from an almost modest repeated action. Afterimage, at Singapore Art Museum until 22 November 2026, is the first monographic exhibition of Taniguchi presented by a Singapore museum and brings these paintings together with sculpture and video. The rectangles are not mechanically printed. Their subtle differences accumulate across days, weeks and sometimes months of work. Taniguchi considers the paintings individual parts of one continuing artwork rather than isolated compositions. I like what that does to repetition. From a distance the surface can appear systematic, almost architectural. Up close, the system becomes a record of labour and duration. Nothing dramatic needs to happen from one cell to the next. Time becomes visible precisely because the gesture changes so little.

https://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/en/art-events/exhibitions/maria-taniguchi-afterimage

#MariaTaniguchi #PhilippineArt #Painting #SingaporeArt

singaporeartmuseum.sg Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage | Singapore Art Museum Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist presented by a Singaporean institution.